Are Netflix Putting Spoilers on Billboards to Make People Stay Home?

The streaming platform might have just done their best stunt yet

Aside from being home to some of the best shows, there’s another thing that Netflix excels at: marketing. In a recently viral campaign, Netflix billboards, with spoilers about their biggest shows, were plastered all over deserted cities in a bid to discourage people from being outside amid the coronavirus outbreak.

But despite what you’ve seen online, this campaign is actually fake. Although it’d be pretty genius if it wasn’t.

Two students at the Miami Ad School in Hamburg, Germany are behind the ingenious campaign. With spoilers from every show possible including Stranger Things and Narcos, to Love is Blind, the students (Seine Kongruangkit and Matihorn Prachuabmoh Chaimoungkalo) came up with the campaign idea after returning to their native country, Thailand, where they were quick to notice the lack of measures taken to get people to stay at home.

“The best way to stop the spread of Covid-19 is to #stayhome, but some people still think it’s okay to go out and chill, spoiling it for us all,” the spec ad reads. “So we took an extreme measure: we spoiled their favourite Netflix shows,” the duo told Forbes in an interview.

A post shared by Miami Ad School (@miamiadschool) on Mar 27, 2020 at 12:33pm PDT

“We decided to help by doing what we know best, coming up with creative ideas,” Prachuabmoh Chaimoungkalo said, explaining what inspired the fake campaign.

They didn’t expect what ensued, the campaign quickly went viral. Sites across the globe reported the campaign, and Twitter went into a frenzy, dubbing it the “most millennial thing [they’ve] ever seen.”

But the billboards, which look ultra-realistic in the photos that were shared, were in fact entirely digital.